Some Practices for 2023
Happy 2023 and heartfelt thanks for being here with me!
Last year at this time, I wrote about tenderness in my 2022 New Year’s post. I wrote about contingency, and fighting optimism. I wrote about focusing more but also about daydreaming more! I wrote about being someone who would try to let my calm be contagious for others.
Well, spoiler alert, I failed in a lot of that stuff last year. The serious black dog danced the blues with me under the serious moonlight for a time. I was in the gutter and no damned stars.
Longtime followers know that I like to post this next passage by Rilke about once a year, and I suppose we all could after last year. We often find our words of solace in a place of sadness and few of us have lived effortlessly.
“Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters on Life
We live in a time of contradictions, and I suppose if I’m honest that will just have to be the theme for my upcoming year: learning to navigate the contradictions. Contingency, sure, ongoing, but if I can figure out how to exist in the mud I’m golden. I’m lucky in that we managed a whole month in Rome to re-set our souls, Rob and I did, this past November. And also: it worked. You don’t really know in what astonishingly bad mental health you’re in until you’re not, so I learned. Basically my mood for the next year is to hang onto what I call my Rome vibe at all costs. Because life really isn’t meant to be like that, the profound unhappiness I was dipping into on the regular. On that note. What follows are some things I’m clinging to and planning on adopting as a practice with diligence and tenaciousness and that wild patience of the poets.
In my preamble here I alluded to Bowie’s song, “Let’s Dance.” And this reminds me of a bit of wisdom that my friend Lisa Martin sent my way at one point, which is that there are going to be a lot of things you can’t change in the ballroom of life, but maybe you get to choose which dance steps you’re going to select that day in your approach. I mean, “dancing with change” is an old saw and all that. (I suppose it works with those things that you have no control over). It’s really all about reframing our experiences: obstacles become challenges, we look at things with curiosity rather than dread, etc.
Okay, so far so good. We’re dancing.
One of the contradictions in my 2023 is that I want to be as calm as possible, but also, I want to make my art as though it’s an emergency. Here are a few more:
I want to be generous, but I don’t want to squander my gifts.
(Rumi: “Be generous. / Be grateful. Confess when you are not).
I want to give my ALL but I want to also play hard to get.
(“I’m not going to call anyone. If someone wants to, they can come look for me. I’m going to play hard to get. From now on, no more fooling around.” — Clarice Lispector)
I want to bring everything I have to the table but I want to work on my boundaries.
I want to be elegant but have no truck with fuckery.
I want to hold you, and me too, to the highest standards but I also want to remember that we’re all trying our best and that sometimes it’s cool to let our standards go to hell.
I plan on playing Jason Isbell’s song, Hope the High Road, a LOT at the start of 2023. Because the last couple years really were a sonofabitch right? The only time I’ve slept well in the last two years was, coincidence?, in Rome for a month in holiday mode.
I’m holding onto a quotation I found in Italo Calvino’s memo on “Lightness” in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. It’s by Paul Valéry: “One must be light like the bird, not like the feather.”
I’m holding onto words that I previously had as my WOTY (word of the year). Uplift, amplify, calm etc. I’m going to continue to go where the love is. I’m going to continue to cultivate Marina Abramavic’s directive to “elevate the public spirit.”
I’m going to try and be useful. I’m going to read this list of 20 helpful things I made recently and try to actually walk the walk.
Rather than a word this year, I’m going with the phrase “my ALL.” Which is borrowed from Sophie Calle whose book with that title is an inspiration for my work in progress. This is the year of my all. I mean by this that I’m going to use all my talents and gifts and I’m going to claim my expertise. I am not going to waste my energy and I am not going to squander.
Of course, you saw how I got on last year, but I think this really will be the year of my ALL. Please feel free to also have a year of your ALL.
